


london

by bliiinding



Category: The 1975 (Band)
Genre: M/M, What else do you want from me, anyway, but bold of anyone to assume i had a choice in it, but they hook up, i forget wtf to put in tags, incredibly embarrassing i know, jamie oborne held a gun to my head and made me write this, me writing and posting g/m fic in the year of our lord 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-31
Updated: 2018-08-31
Packaged: 2019-07-05 02:17:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15854178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bliiinding/pseuds/bliiinding
Summary: To live and die tonight is the aim of the party. Matty calls it as easy an objective as any; he’s always lived recklessly. Sometimes it feels like a lifestyle, sometimes it feels like a death wish, but tonight it sits somewhere in the middle, lingering, like George’s eyes on him, dark and curious in the low light, with the kind of look that makes him want to ask a million questions.





	london

**Author's Note:**

> i know i know i know incredibly cursed me being on this bullshit in 2018 it just happened and idk what to do with this so fucking have it i guess

To live and die tonight is the aim of the party. Matty calls it as easy an objective as any; he’s always lived recklessly. Sometimes it feels like a lifestyle, sometimes it feels like a death wish, but tonight it sits somewhere in the middle, lingering, like George’s eyes on him, dark and curious in the low light, with the kind of look that makes him want to ask a million questions.

And up again, they’re alive. The streetlights serenade the walk down, though it’s barely sunset, Matty calls no time restrictions on this kind of lifestyle. He calls no rules, and all the shots, and that’s why he likes it. There’s a boy waiting for him on the corner, and he knows that he put him here.

“Light or heavy?” George asks him, it’s a way to figure out how they’re feeling, soft spoken strange language. Matty isn’t even drunk yet, but still he’s certain that George has never been a separate individual, but instead just a hallucination, a hazy extension of his ego, a cure for loneliness, something to keep him awake until the nightmares stopped.

“Heavy.” Matty says, always heavy. Summer is a season of heavy days, his twenties is a decade of heavy years, and still he believes in the phantom rescue of escape. They both do. That’s the use in the question, light or heavy, like they’re both just hoping that one day Matty will look George in the eyes, say light, and mean it.

This isn’t a space for liars. This isn’t even a space for friends. The streets are tight and constricting before they even arrive. Matty can hear George’s heartbeat, George can taste Matty’s skin. They pick up everything, just to let it go again.

And they’re stopped at the door, because the world is a maze fitted with traps and nuisances; Matty, small and pretty, slides by easily on a smile and a wink — he’s learned nothing if not how to play this world to his advantage. George however locks his eyes, ready for war, dark and seething; he isn’t allowed past, until Matty claims, “He’s with me. He’s with me.”

“Light or heavy?” It’s Matty’s turn to ask the questions when the room starts suffocating, when he knows George only on a tether of their clasped, sweaty palms.

George stares up at the ceiling, and his pupils dilate slowly. Matty knows him — this is how he starts to let go of everything.

“Somewhere in between.” George says earnestly, and it’s the first time that Matty’s considered something other than black or white to be an option.

The room suffocates them, and they drown quickly.

Resurfacing, they pretend to be strangers, bottles in hands, slender esoteric motions, that boy is the devil, but he’s got God’s own venom in him, and Matty cannot stop himself from watching him dance across the room. Girls. There are always girls. Matty can’t stop himself either. There are girls like sand dunes in the desert. George, he thinks, is an oasis. Or failing that, something else he wants to drain dry.

And the music picks up again. The haze picks up again. Matty can’t see straight again. He falls in love with the colours. He fabricates a meaning from the hieroglyphic shapes. He goes upstairs with the first girl that smiles at him. Her name is Emily. She’s pretty and scarred.

They hit the mattress like equals and Matty feels like this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. He wants to be a king. He wants to be conquered. He wants somebody to take his body like an ocean and make waves. He wants something to drown in. He’s always thirsty, but can never drink enough. It’s a drowned man’s problem.

But then reality pieces itself back together again, and he sees the girl for what she is, Emily, pretty in more than just faded jigsaw puzzle pieces, pretty in reality, like the kind of girls in polaroids, on the covers of magazines he reads when he’s trying to feign indifference. She bends her body until it breaks in two for him, but Matty just looks at this girl and sees a mirror. A reflection of his own broken pieces.

There’s blood on the bedroom floor when he wakes up. The headache tastes like melancholy and sherry and the kind of lollipops he hasn’t had since he was a kid. Childhood. This is the wrong place to think about childhood. This is the wrong room for this. This is the wrong room for him. He feels so lost suddenly, and the open window seems like the only escaping it.

She’s gone now, Emily, though she left him cigarettes. A courtesy gift, ever that or God’s own doing, though Matty has never considered himself much of a believer. Still, he sits and smokes out the window, watching the stars tearing pinprick holes through the perfect facade of midnight. How easy it is to tear a whole world to pieces, all it takes is a few little holes. How easy it is to light up a wasteland, all it takes is a little love.

A little love. He goes back downstairs and hopes this time he might find it.

George is in the kitchen, kissing a girl, kissing the same girl, kissing a girl only a little different. Matty thinks her name must be Emily too. Or at least that’s what he calls her. Grains of sand in the desert, a thousand girls called Emily, crowded into one room, no wonder he can’t breathe, no wonder he’s suffocating, no wonder he’s staring, hovering in the doorway. George’s eyes catch his and burn cold.

A thousand girls all called Emily run to the bathroom and the sun explodes.

They’re standing in the garden. Matty is holding his hands up to cover his face. George is holding a cigarette. There’s a chill in the air. Matty wants to ask to borrow his jacket. But he doesn’t have the words.

He says it again.

“Light or heavy?”

Matty thinks light, but says, “Heavy.” He looks up and sees stars, but wasn’t it just moments ago that he saw the sun explode? Headache. That’s what he calls this. Headache. An explanation in words and moments he’ll never say aloud. Callous minds can keep nothing but thoughts. He isn’t the type for close friends, but here they are, and what is this if nothing else?

“How was Emily?” Matty asks, and at first George frowns like he doesn’t know what he means, but he catches Matty’s drift eventually. Smug smile stretched out around a cigarette. Matty wants to hold out his hands for the ash and catch it. Failing that, he just wants to get burned; penance seems as good thing as any to do with his time.

“Light.” George smiles when he says it, because he knows of course that’s not what Matty meant. 

Matty wrestles with a frown, wrestles with a question, wrestles with his heart, but always, always loses. The world made him slender and pretty, built well enough to start fights, but not strong enough to win them. He looks up to George, and almost asks him to step in.

“How was Emily?” George asks him back, taking Matty’s language from him, stealing it, owning it. It’s his. Matty has nothing left secret. He calls himself mad to think that this was how he wanted it, but it is, it really is.

Matty doesn’t say light, and he doesn’t say heavy, because he thinks at once that neither of those words mean anything. He tries to form a proper sentence instead, but only makes it so far.

“Girls like…”

His eyes go fuzzy, like stars burning out.

“Girls like what?” George asks him, prodding him in the ribs. Matty feels like he’s made of paper, like he just might collapse at any minute.

“Do you think I know?” Matty manages, looking up to the stars for answers, looking up to the stars for some hope of a way back home.

“Matty,” George says, cigarette falling to the asphalt, “You’re a magnet.”

Matty’s quiet for a while, trying to think of something smart, of something juvenile to say, but he can only remember the way coming to felt.

“Should it be light and heavy or just light and dark?” He asks the stars, but they are too far away to hear him.

“How was she?” George asks again, his voice sounds desperate. He has no cigarette to distract him. Matty swallows hard, because he knows George could do anything with those hands if he wanted to. And Matty would let him. Every time he would let him. This is how worlds unravel.

“Heavy.” Matty says at last, speaking the only language he knows when all the lights go out.

George smiles, chuckling slightly. Always asking the kind of questions he’s long since known the answers to.

“I bet I could make you feel fucking weightless.” He’s talking to the stars, but the asphalt is listening in.

Matty feels rooted, frozen, and George’s hand is on his back, a probing question. Matty thinks. Matty thinks. Matty thinks until his mind whites out. But the world turns off too quickly.

“But I still need legs to stand.”

He says, mindless, eyes closed. George is speaking their language, asking light or heavy, yes or no with his hands, Matty gives in every time. In this language, the only word he knows is surrender.

George presses his lips to his neck. “I’ll carry you.” He says.

“Then…” Matty swallows, eyes rolling up. The stars look down at him like faces in the pews, but he knows he doesn’t need to call this a church to feel holy.

“Be my legs.” 

He gives his everything to the boy who carries him upstairs, he’s all seeing stars, and the room tastes so different now. It’s no longer summer but autumn, he’s no longer rich, but poorer. Hands on him, bigger now, they hit the mattress as equals, and Matty thinks about feeling conquered. Matty thinks about becoming a conqueror, but then he looks up to the ceiling. The ceiling tells him, in its own special language, there’s more to land than mountains and valleys, there’s more to man than kings and peasants, there’s more to love than man and wife.

Matty says it out loud then.

“There’s more to us than light and heavy.”

George has him in pieces, but he doesn’t mind it when they stop for air. They can’t spend a whole lifetime drowning, after all.

He looks at him, for the first time, not like he’s hungry, but like he’s seeing him on a full stomach, and Matty repeats that word, equals, over and over to himself, until it means nothing.

George knows this, but says it aloud so Matty can hold it. “There’s little pieces of everything.”

And the room tastes like tangerine. Matty lets go without spinning. George catches him. He stands without legs, but falls just as easily.

“Who am I?” Matty asks him. His eyes aren’t quite wide and delirious yet, so George knows he’s being serious, serious in the non-literal sense. Asking the questions that scare the both of them.

“Anyone.” George tells him, hand cold against skin, putting a boy back in his body. “Everyone.” His lips meet the end of the world and make marriage out of the horizon line between day and night.

“No one?” Matty asks him, warm and curious. He opens up easily, but doesn’t let go again. Glass windows once broken can never be put together again. Only replaced. But they both know this is too singular for that — that’s what makes it dangerous, that’s what keeps them up at night, that’s what keeps them coming back.

“Whatever you want.” George tells him, and means it, like the sun means sunrise when it’s letting in light. Matty remembers the sun, and the thousand Emilys, grains of sand in the desert, bedroom oasis; he wouldn’t be wrong to call this a mirage.

But then George’s hands are on his back again, asking a simple question. It’s one that he doesn’t have the answer to, but he’d like to learn it, if only George might give him the words.

But the look in George’s eyes isn’t something he thinks he can unwind, so he calls it his time to take instead of give, and promises himself that he’ll argue it fair, put it back together, all in the morning. Over coffee, minds riddled with sobriety, and promises that last at least the span of the week.

He’s a thief, he’s a heretic, he’s just a lunatic, and he wants George to call him what he is, and he wants George to say what he wants from this, but he gets static sounds like the TV from when he was a kid, and again, wrong memories, wrong bedroom, this isn’t the house he grew up in, it just has similar curtains.

And George smiles like he can read his thoughts. “Whatever you want.” He says again. Matty starts to question whether he was ever even real at all.

Then his eyes burn white, and this fire is too hot to be all fantasy, this fire is too hot to keep him alive, but George holds him close, holds him cold, and renders the both of them immortal.

Waking up feels like a car crash, the next time he tries it, the next time he decides he doesn’t much like the sound of dying. But George is there waiting for him. Kitchen, bedroom, bathroom sink. Holds his hair back, presses fingertips into his ribs. He leaves his back alone for the time being; he’s run out of questions to keep secret with his skin.

He speaks aloud like they have an audience, like they’re a song, just reaching the first chorus, and Matty supposes it can’t be his fault if he wants to sing along.

So he stays around for breakfast, they share the cab ride home, and the city looks beautiful in the morning, both before and after the heretics of the world have woken up. There’s no dividing line between black and white, light and heavy, they live where the colours and people all blur into one. They live where it’s free to be easy, and easy to be free. Matty calls it home. George calls it London.


End file.
